Ramblings from travels to the interior and exterior

On the Afterglow of Yoga

It’s the predictable effect of practicing yoga after 6:00 pm. As an ashtangi, I normally don’t practice later than 2:00 pm, but Joan Hyman’s final Vinyasa masterclass at the Urban Ashram this evening was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Yoga practitioners often talk about Ashtanga being a particularly rigorous form of yoga, and while I won’t downplay its demands, I will point out that its repetitiveness allows the body to quickly develop a muscle memory that eventually mitigates much of the initial difficulty. I find Vinyasa personally more rigorous, not only because I’m unfamiliar with and unaccustomed to a good number of the poses, but also because Vinyasa poses are held much longer than Ashtanga’s requisite five breaths.

All of which means: I should be wiped out.

Except I’m not.

There’s too much excitement in my system, caused strangely enough by too much yoga—at least for this week. Not only have I been filling in for Abbey’s classes while she’s out sick, but I’ve also been in touch with more yoga friends than usual.

It’s one of the universe’s not so subtle signs that this is really where my life is meant to be at this particular point in time. And I have to admit, it feels good to be plugged in into life again after all the blocks I went through the last several weeks, to have a sense of having come back home to the Eileen that’s familiar (headstrong, impulsive, almost recklessly confident).

I also know that I should be grateful for this period of grace, because there’s no knowing how long it will last. And if that gratitude is all that the universe had to teach me from the long weeks of stagnation (that and the concomitant humility), then the suffering was entirely worth it.